Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Why I Refuse to Buy Ebooks

Now, I know lots of people who have a Kindle, Nook, etc. and love it - that's great; I'm glad they're happy.

Not me, however - I am completely uninterested in jumping on the ebook bandwagon, at least at the moment in the current ebook ecosystem. The main reason is incompatibility - if I buy a Kindle and buy a bunch of books for it, I can't then later buy a Nook or a Sony eReader - if they suddenly become better than the Kindle - and take my books with me; I am locked into the Kindle.

If, as a publisher, you want to sell me DRM-free ebooks that I can read on whatever device I find superior at a given point in time, then I might get on your bandwagon. Until then, I'll stick with good old paper books, which, although big, bulky, and a little more expensive, are truly mine - I can take them anywhere, read them anywhere, and resell them if I want. And they have the side benefit of being nearly indestructible, save for water and fire - which is not something that you can say about ebook readers:

2 comments:

Well, our daughters gave us a Kindle for Christmas, and we are so happy to be able to buy books in English now. We do shop at Treehugger's Dan here in Budapest, but to find books in English is not easy here, as you know; and to find books that we *want* to read is better yet. Still, if we were in the States, we would think like you do! Carolyn

That's a good point - at the moment, I don't have to worry about trying to get English books in a far-off locale. I'll hope that by the time I move internationally again, there's a relatively open ebook standard that will allow people to move books across devices. We'll see ...

About This Blog

I am one of the largely nameless, faceless bureaucrats who work tirelessly (and largely thanklessly) to help ensure that poor people don't go hungry - and a billion other tasks government bureaucrats do that no one notices until something stops working. Living and working in DC is making me angry - and I vent my anger as thoughtfully as I can. Well, OK, maybe I'm not terribly angry ... but I thought it was a good name for a blog. If you're also a bureaucrat, or angry, or thoughtful, I'm happy to entertain guest posts.